It looks the days of most feeds having no ads are quickly coming to a close. I just noticed Google AdSense ads in the feed from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW). As has already been noted, Google been letting a few sites test out this new feature recently. When Google turns on this feature for all AdSense users I expect the flood gates will be thrown open and feeds without ads will quickly become the minority. Just this week I’ve gone from one of the 80+ feeds that I read having ads to four. I don’t know how long Google is going leave this feature in the testing phase, but I’d expect that by the end of May ad free feeds will become pretty rare.
When you combine the idea of Google allowing ads in feeds and their purchase of Urchin you end up with a strong FeedBurner competitor.
UPDATE 5:00pm 27 Apr 2005: Now my PubSub feed has AdSense ads.
4 replies on “Ads In Feeds, The Flood Gates Are Opening”
Do you mean full-text feeds? Or do you think all feeds, even excerpt-only feeds, will have ads?
Seems to me that excerpt-only feeds are already advertisements, advertisements for the full content on the website. Putting ads in those feeds may undercut the goal of driving traffic to the website.
My hope would be that most people would move to full feeds once AdSense for feeds is widely available. I don’t know if that will happen, but that would be my hope. I generally prefer full feeds over excerpts.
There will undoubtedly still be people who insist of excerpt feeds and will still put ads in them. These will likely be the same folks whose sites are already plastered with ads.
I’m not sure where this will settle, but I think given time a happy medium will be found for most feeds between content and ads. That is a question that we still have to wait on until we get and answer. The question this week has already answered is that ads for feeds are here today and they are likely going to take over just the way AdSense did for website ads.
Do you have a screenshot of the PubSub ads? I haven’t yet noticed any in my PubSub feeds.
ps I linked to you here:
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/04/rss_advertising.php
cheers, Richard
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